Inconvenient Fact About Mass Killings

After the mass murder of 10 in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket committed by a man who posted a racist manifesto, Wesley Lowery, a CBS reporter, said: “Let’s be clear, the stuff Tucker (Carlson) and Laura Ingraham say every night, it could be written by white supremacists very often. There’s a section of this manifesto where the shooter starts talking about, ‘People will always say diversity is strength. How is it a strength?’ And I could hear it in Tucker’s voice. He says this all the time, right? But the Ben Shapiros of the world say this. … There are plenty of people in our politics, in our media, who advance these ideas and advance them frequently. … We have to have a conversation about our political rhetoric in our country, right?”

Where to start? This “reporter” implies that “right-wing rhetoric” incited the 18-year-old Buffalo supermarket killer. Where’s the evidence? For all we know, he might’ve been an avid viewer of CBS News.

The next day after this mass murder, an Asian man opened fire on churchgoers in an Orange County, California, church, killing one and injuring five. Most of those at the church were reportedly of Taiwanese descent. But no doubt the shooter routinely DVR’d the Tucker Carlson show. Days later, a black man, who reportedly hated Asians, was arrested for injuring three Korean Americans in a shooting attack at a Dallas hair salon.

Lowery implies that “right-wing rhetoric” turns white males into mass killers. But there’s a problem with this narrative — the facts. When it comes to mass murderers, almost all of which are men, white men are actually underrepresented and black men overrepresented when compared to their percentages of the American male population.

In October 2017, Newsweek, in a story headlined “White Men Have Committed More Mass Shootings than Any Other Group,” wrote, “Statistics show that since 1982, the majority of mass shootings — 54 percent — were committed by white men, according to data from Mother Jones.” But a few paragraphs later it added, “The high number of white men committing mass shootings is also explained, at least in part, by the fact white people make up a majority of the U.S. population (63 percent) and men are more likely to commit violent crime in general.” Wait, white males commit 54% of the mass shootings while the white population is 63%?

About the Newsweek article, PolitiFact said: “Critics argue that when you consider that non-Hispanic white men make up about 63 percent of the male population, white men appear proportionally less likely to commit a mass shooting, according to the Mother Jones statistics showing white men account for 54 percent of mass shootings.”

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh noted that blacks and Asians, from 1982 to 2021, committed 17.4% (12.3 % of the population) and 6.6% (3.6 %of the population) of mass shootings, respectively. Volokh wrote, “Non-Hispanic whites don’t seem to commit mass shootings at greater than their share of the population. The groups that appear overrepresented are blacks and Asians.”

An opinion piece last year in The Washington Post called “The Numbers Undercut Myths About Mass Shootings and White Men” found: “So it appears that the number of white men committing these crimes is close to what we’d expect from pure chance, maybe even slightly lower — the opposite of what we’d see if white supremacy culture were at fault.”

Again, the inconvenient fact is that white males, as a percentage of the American male population, are underrepresented when it comes to mass shooters. Black and Asian males, as to their percentage of the male population, are overrepresented. The left-wing media hyperventilate about “underrepresentation” or “overrepresentation” when it comes to poverty, prison population, admission to elite colleges and universities, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, NFL head coaches or Academy Award winners. But when it comes to mass shooters, suddenly “over-representation” becomes irrelevant.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/88479-inconvenient-fact-about-mass-killings-2022-05-19

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In Brief: ACLU Denies Existence of Women

We’re old enough to remember that “woman” was a definable word. Now, we have an incoming woman Supreme Court justice who refuses to say what a woman is because to do so is to trigger the rabidly gender-confused Left.

Journalist Daniel Greenfield takes on the latest reality deniers at the ACLU.

“We’re Not Stupid: Outrageous Quotes from the War on Women,” the ACLU had headlined a post about its pro-abortion activism in 2013.

A decade later the ACLU is arguing in court that women don’t exist.

Not only does the ACLU’s current abortion coverage eliminate any mention of women, but in response to a civil rights lawsuit by women, it actually filed a motion arguing they don’t exist.

The particular fight has to do with California’s prison system, which houses men with women as long as the men claim to be women. A feminist group that hasn’t succumbed to the gender-bending Rainbow Mafia sued.

Krystal Gonzalez, one of four women being represented in the lawsuit, reported being sexually assaulted by a man who claimed to be “transgender” in prison. The California penal system however insisted that her male attacker was actually a “transgender woman with a penis.”

The ACLU, along with Lambda Legal and the Transgender Law Center, filed a bizarre motion in response denying that, “‘men as a class’ are defined and differentiated from ‘women as a class’ by their ‘anatomy, genitalia, physical characteristics, and physiology.’”

Are there physiological differences between men and women? Science says there are while the ACLU denies it in what may be one of the most surreal motions ever submitted to a court.

Denying sexual dimorphism is up there with a motion claiming that the earth is flat.

But the ACLU motion went on “to deny the allegation that ‘human beings’ are ‘sexually dimorphic, divided into males and females each with reproductive systems, hormones, and chromosomes that result in significant differences between men[] and women[.]’”

Biology 101 is now an “allegation” to be denied in court.

Thus unfolds another chapter in the disgraceful history of the ACLU. As Greenfield concludes, “In an extraordinary document, the ACLU denies everything we know about biological science and it does so in the name of not only erasing women, but exposing them to sexual abuse.”

https://patriotpost.us/articles/88462-in-brief-aclu-denies-existence-of-women-2022-05-19

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The dubious use of sanctions

On 19 April Wimbledon decided to ban all players from Russia, the aggressor in Ukraine, and Belarus, which let Russia use its territory as a staging post for the attacks, from this year’s tournament. The ban may reflect a desire to avoid the possibility of embarrassing the Duchess of Cambridge as the royal patron of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. In that capacity, amidst the centenary celebrations of Centre Court, Kate Middleton is expected to present trophies to the men’s and ladies’ singles winners. There was a good chance that one or both could be Russian or Belarussian, in which case video footage of the trophy presentation could be weaponised for propaganda in the still-raging war.

The spate of expulsions of Russian athletes, artists and even dead authors and composers is an ugly outbreak of neo-McCarthyism ripping through Western institutions. Wimbledon is open to charges of gross hypocrisy and might have fashioned a rod for its own back to be used by activists on any fashionable moral crusade in the future. Why were American, British and Australian players not banned unless they denounced the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Are Russian actions in Ukraine more evil than China’s vis-a-vis the Uighurs? What of countries that execute homosexuals or condemn women to inferior status? The precedent has been set by the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament that even in competitions that feature athletes playing as individuals and not for their nation (as in the Olympics or the Davis Cup), regardless of where they reside (Victoria Azarenka has lived in the US since her teens), they can be banned for the sins of their governments. Of course, it also devalues the tournament. On current world rankings the ban will exclude more than twenty eligible players from the ladies and gentlemen’s (isn’t it nice that Wimbledon has stuck to this traditional language) singles competitions. On 10 May, the world’s leading men’s players called for ranking points to be withdrawn from Wimbledon in protest at the ban.

Wimbledon’s ban is a microcosm of the pathologies that afflict international sanctions. They expand the toolkit of powerful countries to impose their values and policy priorities on the rest and thereby build resentment in the latter who see hypocrisy where sanctions-imposing countries profess moral virtue. It’s proven extremely challenging to secure and sustain universal compliance with sanctions regimes. In a world of scarcity where costs and benefits are unevenly distributed, there will always be a market clearing price for every good. Three months into the war, even the BBC has woken up to the realisation that vast parts of the non-Western world do not share the West’s one-sided anti-Russian narrative. Whether based in economic and military self-interests or in perceptions of Western hypocrisy, double standards and colonial past, many countries have refused to join Western condemnations and sanctions.

In a CNN commentary, Jeffrey Sachs estimates that the 100 countries in the UN General Assembly that did not vote to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council account for 76 per cent of the world’s population. Energy price rises owing to sanctions are an inconvenience to Europeans. It’s a particularly perverse form of selfish arrogance to demand that India, for example, should eschew the purchase of discounted Russian oil when steep ptice rises in essential energy will cause significant hardship for millions of poor Indians.

As this suggests, the impact of sanctions is disproportionately harsh on innocent victims. A starkly graphic example of this was sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War, estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation to have caused 576,000 child deaths by mid-1994. Child mortality rate jumped from 56 to 131 deaths per 100,000 births from 1984–89 to 1994–99, according to Unicef which attributed 500,000 child deaths directly to sanctions. That experience did a lot to discredit sanctions as a supposedly humane alternative to war for dealing with rogue regimes. It also led directly to the oil-for-food scandal in which Australia was so badly implicated. In his annual report on the UN’s work in 1998, Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged that ‘humanitarian and human rights policy goals cannot easily be reconciled with those of a sanctions regime’. Sanctions create shortages and raise prices in conditions of scarcity.

The poor suffer; the middle class, essential to building the foundations of democracy, shrinks; the ruling class extracts fatter rents from monopoly controls over the illicit trade in banned goods. The evidence shows that time and again, family cliques surrounding dictators monopolise the black market spawned by sanctions and the resulting scarcities and shortages of goods in the open market. Sanctions also offer an easy scapegoat for ruinous economic policies. Economic pain is simply blamed on hostile and ill-intentioned foreigners. Bearing pain is portrayed as the patriotic duty of every citizen, and dissent silenced or liquidated.

There is the further pathology of mission creep and mutation. Like race-based affirmative action, gender equality and cancel culture, once introduced for one target group or goal, they are appropriated by others for additional groups and causes that are also pursued with proselytising zeal, meaning that opponents are not just inconvenient obstacles but positively evil. Therefore they are deserving of vilification, dehumanisation and punishment. And so it is that some experts and officials are already calling for countries that fail to cooperate with the WHO during a pandemic to be hit with prompt sanctions under a new pandemic treaty. Presumably this means that Sweden and Florida, among a handful of jurisdictions to have got their Covid policy settings right while all others raced to the bottom of panicked stupidity, would have been subjected to international sanctions. And we can safely predict that laggards in the global Net Zero race to the economic bottom would be early candidates for punitive sanctions.

More often than not, sanctions are morally dubious, ineffective and can be counterproductive, prompting a successful search for self-reliance or alternative suppliers for critical goods. They damage the economic interests of those imposing sanctions, including undermining reliability as a supplier and, in this case, risking the de-dollarisation of the world economy as others invest in the creation of parallel financial systems and institutions that are less vulnerable to capricious strikes by the dominant West. The rouble fell to begin with but since March 10, it has more than doubled in value against the euro, dollar and pound. Often they damage relations with allies and friends without securing the intended objectives against target regimes. All in all, therefore, sanctions are a poor alibi for and not a sound component of good foreign policy.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/bad-policy-bad-politics/ ?

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Biden’s Buffalo Speech Was Speech of Indecent Man

If an American president has ever given as mendacious, anti-American, and hate-filled a speech as President Joe Biden did in Buffalo, New York, last week, I am not familiar with it. Nor are you.

Biden used the terrible mass shooting of black people in a Buffalo grocery store to smear America, divide Americans, and foment race-based hatred. A decent man would have given an entirely different speech.

A decent man would have gone to Buffalo and said something like this:

My fellow Americans, what happened here in Buffalo was pure evil. Let there be no equivocating about this moral fact. If evil exists, what happened here was evil. But, my fellow Americans, this young man and his race-based homicidal hatred represents an infinitesimally small number of Americans, white or otherwise.

The overwhelming majority of Americans of every race, ethnicity, and religion get along with each other beautifully. We work alongside each other, date each other, socialize with one another, and marry one another. We are the most successful experiment in creating a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country in world history. The actions of a deranged teenager do not change this fact.

Instead, the hater-in-chief went to Buffalo and said:

What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that, through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated and lost individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word. Replaced by ‘the other.’ By people who don’t look like them.

Look, we’ve seen the mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas; in Pittsburgh. Last year, in Atlanta. This week, in Dallas, Texas, and now in Buffalo. In Buffalo, New York. White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison. It really is. Running through our body politic. And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more. I mean, no more. We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None …

Look, the American experiment in democracy is in a danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime. It’s in danger this hour. Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America, but who don’t understand America. …

Now is the time for the people of all races, from every background, to speak up as a majority in America and reject white supremacy …

We have to refuse to live in a country where black people going about a weekly grocery shopping can be gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause …

As noted earlier, this was not only a hate-filled speech; it was a speech of the Big Lie. The Big Lie of white supremacy as a major threat to America generally and to black America specifically.

Let’s examine each of the examples of white supremacist mass shootings he gave:

“Charleston, South Carolina”
Seven years ago, Dylann Roof killed nine black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

“El Paso, Texas”
In 2019, a 21-year-old white racist, Patrick Wood Crusius, killed 23 people and wounded 21 others at a Walmart store. The great majority of his victims were Hispanic.

“Pittsburgh”
In 2018, a white antisemite, Robert Gregory Bowers, murdered 11 Jews attending Sabbath services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. As was the case with the Buffalo shooter, Bowers was a deeply troubled man. His father, while on trial for rape, committed suicide when Bowers was 7 years old, and like all the examples Biden cited, he was a troubled loner. Neither he nor any of these other shooters worked in concert with any hate group or co-conspirators.

“Last Year in Atlanta”
In 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long killed eight people at three massage parlors. The killings were motivated by his sex addiction and his religious conviction that those who tempted him should be killed. Race had nothing to do with it.

“This Week in Dallas, Texas”
Last week in Dallas, Jeremy Smith shot and wounded three women of Asian descent.

Smith is a black man.

Why Biden included this shooting as an example of white supremacy is a puzzle. Why no mainstream media I could find noted and condemned this lie is not puzzling.

So, then, our hate-fomenting president mentioned six examples of “white supremacist” shootings. A total of two, one of them seven years ago, involved a white racist shooting black people. One involved a sex addict killing sex workers. One involved a black man shooting Asian people. One involved an antisemite targeting Jews. And one was a black man who shot Asian Americans.

With these examples, Biden went to a grieving black community to lie to them in order to stir up anger in them about the alleged scourge of white supremacist violence in this country.

At least half of this country knows why Biden did this:

First, to focus Americans’ attention on “white supremacy” rather than on the inflation, looming recession, food crisis, and energy crisis he and his party have created with their policies.

Second, to keep black Americans voting Democrat by saying to them, in effect: “You need protection from your fellow hate-filled Americans; we Democrats are your protectors.”

Meanwhile, 9,941 black Americans were killed in 2020. Nearly all were killed by other black people. But to Biden, his party, and the mainstream, i.e., left-wing, media, those black lives don’t matter. At all. Why not? Because they weren’t killed by white supremacists, and they therefore don’t serve the Democrats’ deliberately divisive narrative.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/24/bidens-buffalo-speech-was-the-speech-of-an-indecent-man/ ?

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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